


The Faeries' Midwife

by zjofierose



Series: Sheith Angst Week 2018 [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Hallucinations, Hurt Keith (Voltron), Keith (Voltron) is Bad at Feelings, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-28
Updated: 2018-08-28
Packaged: 2019-07-03 20:51:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15826704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zjofierose/pseuds/zjofierose
Summary: the line between dream and nightmare, between asleep and awake, has always been a hazy one for Keith. Voltron makes it all that much worse.





	The Faeries' Midwife

When he’s three years old, Keith wakes in the middle of the night frozen with terror and staring into the glowing eyes of a lion sitting on his chest. He can’t move, he can’t breathe, he can’t risk crying for help because what if the lion realizes he’s awake and eats him? He can feel the weight of it on his chest, can smell its hot, fetid breath on his face, can see the edges of his room around his bed, so he  _ knows  _ it’s not a dream.

He lies awake until dawn, petrified and unmoving, silent tears leaking out of his eyes. When his dad enters the room and clicks on the light, suddenly the lion is gone, and Keith is free to fling himself sobbing into his father’s arms, gasping out the  _ size  _ of it, the  _ weight  _ of it, the way it watched him  _ all night _ . 

“Oh, hon,” his dad says, rubbing comforting circles on his small back, “it was just a bad dream. No lion’s gonna eat you in this house, I promise.”

It was  _ not  _ a bad dream, Keith insists, it was  _ real _ , it was  _ right there, _ and his father nods and humors him, but Keith can tell already that he’s not believed.  _ It was real _ , he says one last time, and lets it go.

He doesn’t sleep well for a week.

\--

It  _ was  _ just a bad dream, as it turns out, but it takes years before Keith manages to sort out what they are, these dreams that happen to him. Years of terrifying creatures resting on his bed, his blankets turning to spiders, ghosts from a horror movie the other kids in the foster house had snuck standing morosely at the end of his bed. The line between sleep and awake is less a line for him, it seems, and more of a hazy grey area, in which his mind is dreaming while his body is awake, his helpful brain superimposing made-up images on his visible surroundings and filling him with terror.

By the time he gets to the Garrison he has a pretty good handle on when they’re most likely to occur: if he’s overtired, if he’s over-stimulated. Sometimes if he’s particularly anxious about a specific event or person. The problem, of course, is that basic training at the Garrison hits basically all of those triggers on a regular basis, and that’s how, after the third time he ends up halfway down the hall and tugging on his boots at three in the morning while cadet drill marches down the hall, he starts to teach himself to ignore them.

It’s hard. The scary ones are the easiest, because if he can convince himself to stop and think for a moment (a hard enough task in itself when waking in a panic), he can doggedly rationalize his brain into acknowledging that it’s really  _ vanishingly  _ unlikely that a ten-foot flesh-eating monster is standing at the foot of his bunk, much less doing so quietly enough that it’s not disturbing his roommates. Teaching himself to see the spectres and then to lie down and go back to sleep is another step, but he forces himself through it as pragmatically as possible. If it is indeed a ten-foot flesh-eating monster at the end of his bed, then there’s nothing he can do about it anyway, so logically lying down and going back to sleep is the best course. Right? Right.

The more mundane ones are harder, because while it’s still  _ somewhat  _ unlikely that Iverson is crouched next to his bunk, berating him for not polishing his boots, it’s not entirely outside the realm of possibility. Finding a coping mechanism for those takes longer, but he eventually gets in touch with his inner perfectionist, scrupulously dotting every i and crossing every t. This way, even if he can’t dismiss the scenario, he can lie back down confident in the knowledge that his work is fully complete and done exactingly. Maybe Iverson would sneak into the cadets dorm and do a surprise boot inspection, that could definitely be real, but the idea that Keith’s boots would be anything less than perfectly buffed, polished, and lined up at the end of the bed? Nah.

The end of his first year brings the week-long sim trials, and marks the first time that Keith’s ever had to deal with seeing things while ostensibly awake and active. He does ok in the drills and pods themselves, more than ok if he’s honest, flying on instinct and depending on his team to feed him info. Even at the end, when half of what he’s seeing isn’t real, he grits his teeth and guts it out, landing the highest scores of anyone since one Takashi Shirogane. Tracers of planets and asteroids follow him when he steps out of the shuttles, making him flinch in the hallways as he resists ducking to avoid a sudden moon to the head. The other cadets look at him funny, but they’re equally tired and strung out, so they don’t spend too much time on it once he glares them away. 

He manages.

\--

He doesn’t have any dreams while Shiro’s gone. It’s possible it’s because he sleeps too much, but in retrospect, he thinks it was just a symptom of his total shutdown. He didn’t think, he didn’t feel, he didn’t dream. 

\--

And then Shiro’s back, and they’re piloting lions, and somehow he’s part of a giant flying space robot, and… well, over-tired and over-stimulated doesn’t begin to cover it. It’s rough, for a while, he’s out of practice with keeping his mind calm enough to work his way through whether what he’s seeing is real or not, and he finds himself jumping at things that aren’t there for weeks. Lance and Hunk are too preoccupied with everything else to pick up on Keith being weirder than usual, and the Alteans, well, Keith thinks half the time they see things that aren’t there, too, so they’re not likely to find him out. Pidge notices, but doesn’t ask, and Shiro knows from before, so he just takes Keith by the shoulder and tells him softly to get as much sleep as he can. 

Red is an unexpected advantage- while Keith’s mind is fully capable of not only seeing things that aren’t there, but also of misrepresenting the read-outs of all his instruments, Red doesn’t have the same issues, and responds with obstinance any time Keith seems to be reacting to something it can’t sense. Bonding with his lion affords him a built-in head-check, because if he can see it with  _ his  _ eyes, but not his lion’s, then it can’t be real. It becomes almost like sonar in a way, the automatic ping between his tired, overwrought brain and the lion’s exceptionally exact senses, and he has to wonder if he’d stayed on earth and become a pilot there how long it would have taken before he crashed and burned.

With Shiro gone, it’s so much worse. He’d never dreamed about Shiro before, not these kind of dreams, but suddenly he’s everywhere, standing at Keith’s bedside at night and watching him with sad, sad eyes; following him down the hall and berating him for the decisions he’s making. Those are the good ones, the ones where he can almost believe it’s real, can almost let himself sink into it. He talks to Shiro sometimes, pretends that he doesn’t know that this Shiro is a figment of his own fractured and over-stressed brain, pretends that his subconscious isn’t just somehow creating the entire thing out of whole cloth.

Worse are the times that he sees Shiro covered in blood, or missing an arm, or screaming as he’s tortured on the floor of Keith’s room. One time it’s Shiro’s corpse standing at the end of the bed, eyes glowing yellow and long, stringy hair falling from his head, his gums and lips cracking as he bares his rotting teeth in a macabre grin.

Learning to fly Black complicates things, because where Red was focused almost exclusively on the here and now, Black is infinitely bigger and more magic. Black sees as many things that aren’t there as Keith does, but they’re different things, and so there’s a whole new layer of complication to work through. Is what he’s seeing on the radar? If no, then is what he’s seeing somewhere in the quintessence field? If no, then is it some magical thing that Black is just… picking up on? Somehow? If no, then probably it’s just Keith’s weirdo brain. Eventually he gets the whole process down to whether or not Black’s response to what he’s busy reacting to is confusion. If it is, then probably what he’s seeing is not real on any plane of existence, and he can safely ignore it. 

It’s not a perfect system, but it’s all he’s got.

When Shiro comes back, again, it’s just too much. His poor brain can’t take it, and neither, honestly, can his heart. He has dead Shiro staring at him every night, he has newly returned Shiro acting confused and asking him questions that Keith thinks Shiro should know the answer to, so is this what, a test? He’s got sad Shiro talking at him as he walks down the halls, and shouting angrily at new, returned Shiro, and he’s got Black’s now omni-present confusion about two of the three Shiros that Keith can see, but it’s hard to keep straight which ones are giving Black pause.

The Blade of Marmora gives him space. When he’s on a mission, he can rest assured that any Paladins he sees, any Alteans, any Shiros - they’re all fake. None of them are there, and he can ignore them all, focusing on the task at hand. It’s a hollow relief: he misses them, misses them all terribly, but at least now when he inevitably fucks this all up and responds to the wrong thing, or hears an instruction that isn’t there, at least it will only be him. Just him, and no one else, only himself and the figments in his head, the voices in his ears and the afterimages in his eyes.

When the Blade asks him to stay, he does.

 

**Author's Note:**

> another one-off for Sheith Angst Week 2018, this one for the prompt of "Hallucinations". Unbetaed and written in a rush, so, ymmv.


End file.
